For the last two decades, free marketers have expressed hopes that the market would resolve these problems with new technology and charity. Alas, no progress has been recorded. The markets do not work because they have been captured by vested interests, reflecting a wider problem of current American crony capitalism.

New technologies and charity are no match for these vested interests. As even the great libertarian Friedrich Hayek taught us in his monumental book, “The Constitution of Liberty,” basic education and health care are government responsibilities.

The U.S. public expenditures on health care are about as large as a share of GDP as European countries, but the government funding is so much more inefficient.

There are five main reasons for the failure of U.S. health care. They have been well analyzed and all of them benefit major lobbies:

Everything is wrong with U.S. health-care financing. It is completely fragmented with at least four major public systems, of which only Medicare for retirees is general and a plethora of private insurance schemes. All European countries have either universal private insurance or direct state financing, which are much better administered.

While European insurance companies are usually mutually-owned by the insurance takers, U.S. insurance companies work for profit and find it cheaper to harass their customers with innumerable administrative queries than to deliver services.

Until ObamaCare, many insured Americans were deprived from insurance benefits because insurance companies blamed “pre-existing conditions.” ObamaCare also reduced the share of uninsured Americans. Yet, little is likely to improve in U.S. health care until the U.S. opts for a uniform system of its financing, be it public or private.

Few markets in the U.S. are more protected than the market for patented medicines. Their prices are typically three times higher than anywhere else, and a major U.S. government concern is to block cheap imports from Canada.

Incredibly, President George W. Bush’s Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 prohibited the large public Medicare from negotiating drug prices, having to accept high monopolistic prices, while ObamaCare did nothing to reduce this generous corporate welfare.

When leaving hospitals, patients in the U.S. are often contacted by law firms that suggest that they sue their physicians for the treatment they have received. This practice is so prevalent that every physician needs an insurance of at least $ 100,000 a year as protection against lawsuits, according to Reid.

Naturally, many lawsuits are justified, but many are not, and they employ a vast army of attorneys. The American Bar Association is a major donor to the Democratic Party, according to Reid, and it fights any reform of the U.S. tort system tooth and nail. The Republicans call for tort reform but have not done anything to rein in legal malpractices.

The quickly rising health-care costs are a major reason that most Americans’ real incomes have stagnated for the last four decades. Can Americans really continue to accept this wasteful harm? The Republicans have tried to abolish ObamaCare and the limited improvements it brought about but failed to find an alternative.

Currently, the Democrats have made improved health care one of their main issues, calling for “Medicare for All.” That makes a lot of sense. Medicare is the best functioning public health insurance system. It is universal for all pensioners.

While it provides minimum support, it can be supplemented with private insurance. It leaves the supply of medical services and medicine to the private sector, though the legal prohibition to negotiate drug prices must be abolished. With such a system, the U.S. should be able to reduce health-care costs, while raising its performance to a European level.

Anders Åslund is a Swedish economist and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.